EDUCAUSE | net generation

Wider Access to ELI Discovery Tools Now Available

pkurkowski — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 12:03:37 -0600

EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) Discovery Tools on blogging, podcasting, Net Generation, and learning spaces are now available to non-ELI members.

ELI Discovery Tools help people move ideas into action on campus by equipping them with the concepts and practical guidance to advance their goals, whether it’s a technology implementation, faculty or staff workshop, or any other teaching and learning project. “ELI Discovery Tools focus on student learning and are designed to save you time in creating professional development events, understanding and applying technology, and gathering student/faculty input,” said Julie Little, ELI Interim Director.

Meg and Joan Lippincott Net Savvy Video

jcummings — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 09:45:41 -0500

Joan Lippincott, associate executive director of the Coalition for Networked Information, contributed a video interview to the ELI 2007 Fall Focus Session, Being Net Savvy: Developing Skills for A Rapidly Changing World. Here's her description of it:

"My daughter, Meg Lippincott, a sophomore at Vassar College, has been working at her college library reference desk and occasionally sharing some observations with me about how students seek information for their academic work. I interviewed her for a brief video for the ELI Focus Session on net savvy students. Her friend Jan Zhan, a student at University of Maryland, did the camera work. Meg discusses some aspects of information literacy, the way she learned to use some math software, and her definition of a 'net savvy student.'" --Joan Lippincott

Kate Wittenberg on How Students Are Transforming the World of Information

jcummings — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 14:11:10 -0600

As part of my continuing series of interviews leading up to the ELI 2007 Annual Meeting, I talked with Kate Wittenberg, Director of the Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia University, or EPIC. She will hold a featured session at the annual meeting on Wed., Jan. 24, from 8:00-9:00 AM entitled “While You Were Out: How Students Are Transforming the World of Information and What It Means for Publishing.”

In the interview, Wittenberg provides a brief overview of the new ways in which students are developing content and using information, and what that means for the development and management of information resources within the university. She also describes EPIC and how its efforts in digital content development reflect current and emerging trends in student creation and use of online content.

Carie Windham on the Net Generation Perspective

jcummings — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 13:45:18 -0600

In preparation for the ELI 2007 Annual Meeting, I interviewed recent North Carolina State University graduate Carie Windham on the issues behind her upcoming annual meeting featured session, "Father Google and Mother IM: Confessions of a Net Gen Learner," scheduled for Tuesday, January 23, from 1:30-2:30 PM, Eastern.

Windham's session will take a look at how the Net Generation views and uses technology, and what those views and uses mean for higher education. In addition to summarizing some of the key points in her presentation, the interview allowed Windham to discuss relevant issues she won't get a chance to cover during her session.

ELI will post the full audio from keynote and featured sessions after the conference, so check back to hear more from this Net Gen learner about teaching, learning, technology, and the Net Generation.

Music Discovery Services in the Classroom

catherine — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 11:49:30 -0600

Online music discovery services and streaming web radio are generating waves in contemporary youth culture, mirrored in the blogosphere. Web-based music services such as Musicovery, Pandora, Last.fm, Soma.fm and their ilk are undoubtedly starting to change the ways that young people today discover, share and discuss the music and media they care about. But are they at all relevant in the classroom? How can web-based music services be used to educate, as well as to consume?

My suggestion: online music discovery services have the potential to become an excellent self-guided learning resource for students of music classification, period and genre. Playing around with some of the different available services, and specifically, comparing their different music classification systems, could provide students with a highly accessible introduction to the history of musical styles, performance techniques, and interactions between music and other media, such as film and television.

So, we might start by comparing the music choices on Soma FM’s “Groove Salad” station with those on Musicovery’s “Electro” category, as an accompaniment to the history of electronic and electro-acoustic music. Or a teacher might ask students to compare the concept behind Pandora’s Music Genome Project™ with Musicovery’s music description system (see Robin Good’s post for more information).

The classification systems that we use to distinguish different types of music are essentially social and cultural in nature. They tell us much about cultural mechanisms for organizing knowledge. When we are able to see how these mechanisms unfold and change over time, we learn about history. Using music discovery services in the classroom could help teachers to integrate music theory, music appreciation and the history of music in some new and interesting ways.

Educational Technology Fosters Staff-Student Dialogue

catherine — Fri, 24 Nov 2006 08:21:05 -0600

I was pleased to note that several comments in an article in today's THES ("Meet the avatars, your new students", subscription required) endorse my belief that the growing use of technology in education will ultimately lead to enhanced interaction between staff and students. Educational technology should enable flows between people, objects, and institutions - it should enable engagement - not just funnel information to the individual, in his/her cosy personalised learning environment.

Delegates to the forthcoming Online Educa Berlin conference were asked how IT would change the nature of academics' work in the next decade -- and, surprise surprise, most comments focused on students, learning, and new pedagogies.

I particularly liked the comment from David Richardson (Kalmar University, Sweden - ahh, he blogs, too):

Academics are going to be working with their students much more on a one-to-one basis, rather than seeing them as a mass of people in a lecture hall. In one sense, we'll be going back to an ancient way of working, rather like Socrates meeting people in the agora in Athens--students and teachers will engage in that kind of Socratic dialogue on a much more casual basis than today, as and when the questions occur.

I'm not ready yet to dismiss the benefits of learning in a face-to-face group environment, but I really like the idea of fostering dialogue. The next challenge will be managing the social stuff that this implies, like changing concepts of privacy, availability, and attention, together with managing information overload.

Follow-up on Facebook.edu: Students, Software, and Emergent Social Practices

catherine — Tue, 16 May 2006 11:44:11 -0500

I wanted to follow up on a couple of points that came up in Stephen Downes's reply to my "Facebook.edu" post.

The first issue is about ownership. Cole made the point that students often perceive institutional software as "not theirs". I would add that there are (at least) two sides to this. One is to do with plain old functionality -- does the commercial or publicly available stuff work better? Does it have more critical mass? Does it tie in well with students' overall media use? The other, more important issue is to do with control, the management of personal and social identities, and shared social protocols for use of technology.

I think we have to accept that students are creators of content, as well as users and consumers. There is no necessary conflict between that statement and my earlier comment that "We need to challenge our students intellectually, not just confirm their existing (techno-)social practices". This was reinforced for me today, reading Tom Morris's comments about the BBC's plans "to build its website around user-generated content [...] with the aim of creating a public service version of MySpace.com". Tom writes:

"What the BBC don't seem to understand is that user-generated content is happening all around them, and that we don't need "BBC Blogs" or "BBC Flickr" or "BBC YouTube" for that to happen."

And we don't need institutional versions of them, squirrelled away in a CMS, either. Tom is right to say that degrees of freedom are needed in order to foster the creative use of information, and of technology. Intelligent content creation requires engagement. That's what we should be trying to foster in students. People should be able to use their existing favourite platforms and "draw in" the content that is interesting and valuable to them.

This latter point ties in well with Stephen's thoughts on privacy and recent media scare-mongering about students and Internet use. I am increasingly of the opinion that there is a major generation gap emerging between older academics and administrators and students. For the older academics, identity is protected through restricting access to it; by using the language of privacy and confidentiality to talk about it; by preferring password-protected environments. For the younger students, identity is protected by becoming your own publisher and marketer; the emerging consensus is that you control your image and reputation by editing (and circulating) it yourself. By speaking first, not last. This generation gap may yet end up being more socially significant than the much-heralded "digital divide."